Abstract

This essay seeks to reexamine the relationship of Mary Wollstonecraft to what have been called the eighteenth century's "politics of sense and sensibility" through the lens of her public battles with Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I demonstrate that Wollstonecraft embraces an openly contradictory stance toward such a politics in the service of her progressive political goals, especially as regards her support of the French revolutionaries, and in doing so elides a certain problematic inherent in the political embrace of emotion and sentimentality.

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